Long Island, Greenwood District.
This place had once been known for its quiet, tree-lined avenues and neat rows of townhouses. Now it looked like it had fallen into a cheap, low-budget horror nightmare.
That shrill noise—like countless insects screaming inside your skull, amplified a thousand times—was no longer quite so high-pitched, but it felt like it had grown sticky. It seeped into the air, soaked into the ground.
A strange smell hung over everything.
It wasn't sulfur. It wasn't blood.
It was the stench of old, damp, rotting vegetation mixed with the nauseating reek of burned cheap plastic. It wasn't especially strong, but it was everywhere. Every breath you took dragged it into your lungs, bringing with it waves of nausea and a vague, directionless sadness.
On the streets, the chaos had reached its peak.
In the dim glow of the streetlights, the crowd looked like a disturbed anthill—people screaming, shoving, running without any sense of direction. Terror twisted their faces together with a weird, vacant dullness.
Some people, in the middle of running, suddenly grabbed their heads and dropped into a squat, letting out hysterical wails as if they were hearing something that no one else could hear.
Others had empty, lifeless eyes. They stumbled about like puppets on broken strings, walking straight into overturned cars without even trying to dodge. Metal scraped their skin open and drew blood, but they only stared blankly, tears streaming down their faces as they muttered nonsense under their breath.
Police cars with flashing lights struggled to move through the confusion.
The officers' faces were chalk-white. They clutched their ears with one hand and waved frantically with the other.
"This way! This way, evacuate this way! Cover your ears! Don't listen to that sound…!"
Even their shouts carried an unmistakable tremor and confusion—
That noise clearly wasn't just sound anymore. It was gnawing at people's minds.
The source of it all sat in the small park at the center of the Greenwood community, writhing like some gigantic, malformed rubber sculpture.
It was so huge it made it hard to breathe, taking up nearly the entire park.
Calling it a "monster" barely did it justice. It was more like a horrifying composite mass: a tangle of colossal, sticky brown-green mycelium fused with swollen, twisted, deep-purple mushroom caps of flesh.
It had no clear limbs or head. The whole "body" was like a pile of forcibly over-grown, rotting mushrooms jammed together.
Countless thick and thin strands of fungal tissue—like enormous worms or tentacles—stretched out from the underside of the main mass, burrowing deep into the park's grass and soil. They pulsed rhythmically like giant veins, as if sucking something up from the ground.
On top of the main body, the huge, thick, umbrella-like purple-black "cap" was riddled with countless irregular holes, big and small, like sightless cave mouths.
The piercing, skull-boring noise, and the mind-twisting psychic interference riding on it, were constantly being squeezed and blasted out from these holes.
With every pulse of sound, viscous purple fluid oozed from the edges of the openings, dripping to the ground with a sizzle and sending up greasy, smoky wisps that stank of rotting plants.
Beneath the massive cap, several even longer, thicker "main mycelia" extended outward. They looked like some grotesque parody of tentacle arms.
Every time one of those main tendrils swung, it was accompanied by an even louder wave of sound and a cloud of faintly green gas, visible to the naked eye, spreading out in a haze laced with hallucinogenic particles.
Where those main mycelia swept across the surrounding trees, the leaves withered and fell in an instant.
When they brushed past the cars parked along the edge of the park, the paint on the bodies cracked and blistered at a speed visible to the eye, accompanied by the harsh hiss of acid eating through metal.
And when they swept across people who couldn't dodge in time…
A few residents who'd been swept along by the panic and pushed to the edge of the park looked on in despair as one of those massive, python-thick tendrils suddenly lashed out, coiling tightly around the Victorian-style clock-tower spire of the community library.
(End of Chapter)
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